For Tara

Every day? Still? We'll see....

So I've been thinking about procrastination (goes without saying I haven't been doing anything about it). It's sort of counterintuitive that I'm concentrating on this the last few days, since my lifelong procrastination problem has actually gotten much, much better over the last year or so. No more folders on my desk at work whose contents I'm afraid to excavate, and sometimes the homework actually gets done before the day it's due (sometimes, that is, not often). I used to think that it was a combined fear of success/fear of failure thing; you know, you don't want to do too well on a project cause then people will expect that level of performance from you as a matter of course and screw up your 'it's always more fun being the underdog' strategy, plus which if you procrastinate and do a half-assed job then you have a built-in excuse for why it's not any good and don't have to secretly worry that you actually weren't capable of doing any better. (Obviously I belong to the run-on sentence school of self-psychiatry. And obviously I've read and thought way too much about this.)

And maybe some, or even all of that was true when I was younger, not that understanding it ever did a damn bit of good when it came to doing anything about it. But at my age I can no longer really even pretend to be the underdog, come-outta-nowhere kid, and nowadays I can usually convince even my nagging inner voice that I'm capable of handling, if not brain surgery, at least the things I need to do in my life as I've created it. Which is sort of the problem, "my life as I've created it", or at least touches tangentially on sort of the problem: the last few days I've been formulating a theory that procrastination now has evolved for me into a way of keeping the possibilities open. To not have to commit to the life I'm living as my actual life. (Nice that I seem to have the same bad habit as ever but for different reasons. Boy, my subconscious is clever.)

My procrastination (though, once again, a lot better than it used to be) keeps me from investing fully in the things I do; last minute half-assing my way through crucial parts of my life makes it seem not quite real. Just a temporary distraction. Still so many possibilities on the horizon for what my real life will be. I'm not getting old! I still have plenty of time to decide what I want to do when I grow up, and obviously this isn't it, since I have yet to change the entire world in any meaningful way or at the very least write a best-selling book. And if I also procrastinate when it comes to making Big Decisions about my future, then all possible futures are still open to me. Bonus! (Except probably the future of becoming the first woman to play major league baseball -- I've sort of made my peace with the fact that that was never a possible future of mine.)

On the other hand I am actually taking real classes (after meaning to do it for years), learning stuff about things I'm interested in, and if I do the assignments at the last minute maybe it's just because I also work full time, and if I'm not sure where all of this is going in the long run and keep agonizing over my ultimate career goals, well, maybe I should just relax and not overplan and see what happens for once. So there's the 'cut yourself some slack and things will work out" theory, as well. Of course, I like both of my possible theories, so I think I'll procrastinate on deciding which one is valid so that I can keep my options open...